Canada: Supports Israel, but soft on Nazis

It’s been no secret that under Stephen Harper, Canada has moved away from a more nuanced and neutral position in the Middle East to one of supporting Israel at all costs. Criticism of the state of Israel is becoming synonymous with anti-Semitism, but the roots of this policy are as much in the socially conservative wing of the party, where fundamentalist Christians see the state of Israel as a necessary component for the End Days to happen.

So really, it wasn’t much of a surprise that I got the phone call I did this afternoon.

A female voice on the other end said that she was calling from “Supporter Services” on behalf of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and she asked if I thought it was important for Canada to support the State of Israel.

For the record, I told her I was a journalist and cut off the call, but when I posted this on Twitter, I had a few other people tell me they’d been told similar stories.

None of this is really surprising. I have to wonder if the supporting-Israel-at-all-costs PMO isn’t a little nervous about protecting their flanks these days after the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which hunts down Nazi war criminals, gave us a low grade in its new report. In fact, our efforts were called “a terrible failure.”

So how long before we can expect to see Harper, Jason Kenney and Peter Kent publicly vowing to crack down on Nazi war criminals? Along with using the results of this little poll to presumably show how much support there is in Canada for the state of Israel, by which they will bludgeon the opposition parties who dare to criticize the support-Israel-at-all-costs policies, I’m guessing.